Realistic Bug Triaging

The task of assigning a bug report to the developer “best” able to address it involves identifying a list of developers qualified to understand and address the bug report and ranking them according to their expertise. Most research in this area addresses this task by matching the description of the bug report and the developers’ prior development and bugfixing activities. This thesis puts forward a more realistic formulation of the bug-assignment task. First, we develop a novel model of the developers’ expertise, taking into account relevant evidence from their code-development contributions, as well as their contributions to relevant Question-and-Answer (Q&A) platforms. Second, we adopt an economics perspective to the task, and we propose to generalize the task from “assigning one bug to the best developer” to “cost-effectively assigning multiple pending bugs to a set of qualified and available developers.” In this paper, we report on our early results on the value of broadening the notion of developer’s expertise to take into account evidence from Q&A platforms.